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Columbus schools’ legal bill at $500,000, and counting

Columbus school attendance scandal

Columbus City Schools employees -- and perhaps others in schools throughout the state -- are accused of falsifying students' records to improve their schools' standing on state report cards. Read the complete series.

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Enlarge ImageRequest to buy this photoAdam Cairns | Dispatch File PhotoRobert “Buzz” Trafford, the lead attorney dealing with the student-data scandal from the law firm hired by the Columbus school board, said his firm is charging a discounted rate and has not charged for some work.

The legal bill for handling Columbus’ student-data scandal has topped a half-million dollars, with the school board setting aside another $250,000 for its defense last week.

The board hired Porter Wright Morris & Arthur in August after the state auditor began investigating whether Columbus City Schools employees tampered with student data in an effort to make the schools look better. Since then, the scope of the state investigation has grown. Also, the FBI began investigating, and two parents sued the board and district officials.

On Friday, the law firm submitted its first bills since December. They show that Porter Wright spent all of the $315,000 it was allocated for the 2013 fiscal year. The firm’s work could have been more expensive, said Robert “Buzz” Trafford, the lead Porter Wright lawyer working on the matter, but it is charging a discounted rate and did not charge for some work.

The invoices show that 21 Porter Wright employees worked 1,665 hours between November and May on “governance and compliance issues,” which include managing FBI and state investigators’ subpoenas and records requests. The normal hourly rates for that work typically would be between $125 and $250, the invoices said, but Porter Wright instead billed $54.35 per hour, on average.

Defending the district in the two civil lawsuits brought by parents was pricier per hour. The civil suits claim district employees willfully misrepresented schools’ true academic status, harming students; one aims to become a class-action suit. The average hourly rate billed in one case was $248.44 and the other was $138.80, though less time has been spent on the cases than on managing the investigations.

Porter Wright decided not to bill for some services and waited until the end of the fiscal year to send bills. The fiscal year ended on Sunday. That meant there was no public record for months to show how quickly Porter Wright was spending its allocation or to indicate whether more public money would be needed to fund the legal work. Regardless, the firm has kept the district updated almost daily on its work and the cost, Trafford said.

“The firm is well aware of the mounting costs of the various investigations and the district’s tight budget,” Trafford wrote.

The district has two in-house lawyers who also handle some data-scandal-related issues. Larry Braverman, the district’s chief legal counsel, said he doesn’t know whether the new quarter-million-dollar allocation will last the year.

Trafford said that legal bills have mounted — and the district has been burdened — because the state auditor’s investigation has gone on so long and expanded in scope. It began by examining whether children had been secretly withdrawn so that their test scores wouldn’t count (Auditor Dave Yost already has found that they were) but has grown to include whether administrators changed kids’ grades, unbeknownst to teachers.

“The Auditor of State initially committed to completing his work regarding the district by fall 2012. Then he said it would be completed in late 2012, then early 2013, then spring 2013, then probably by August 2013 and now on an indeterminate date,” Trafford wrote.

The auditor has issued more than 40 subpoenas for information and used warrants to seize records on two occasions.

Yost said this week that he’s frustrated by the length of the investigation, too, but that he’s not responsible for the extended timeline. That’s the district’s doing, Yost said: Witnesses interviewed by investigators have been intimidated and retaliated against by the district for speaking out and important records have been kept from auditors.

“This is the only school district in the state that has found it necessary to filter every last piece of information through a downtown law firm. And that’s unquestionably slowed things dramatically,” he said. Trafford said any prudent district would seek independent legal advice in these circumstances.

In addition, Yost said his investigators keep finding potential areas of wrongdoing.

“That’s the trouble when you turn over a rock. You never know how many critters are going to crawl out. Sometimes we turn over a rock and there aren’t any critters,” Yost said. But there are plenty in Columbus, he said.

The board last week also set aside $75,000 more for Organ, Cole & Stock for the 2014 fiscal year. The Columbus-based law firm is defending the district against a lawsuit brought by Dispatch Printing Co., publisher of The Dispatch, which sued the school board after the board held private meetings to consult with its attorney in the data-scandal case. A judge ordered the board to stop meeting in private just to confer with Trafford, but at issue now is whether the meetings violated Ohio’s open-meetings law.